Are We Repeating the Mistakes of the Last War on Terror?

by Eric Rauchway

Mr. Rauchway is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis.

The last American war on terror failed to catch the perpetrators and its flailing
ruthlessness instead eroded trust in government. The present war is heading in
the same direction: as the World Economic Forum reported in its run-up to Davos,
a year of fighting terror has produced a world in which most people - including
Americans - mistrust their government and do not believe it represents them. This
will worry enlightened minds hoping for democracy's success; it also stands, like
the last war, to cost a great deal of money without improving security.

For 150 years, the United States has benefited from the trust of the world's
peoples, who, facing a choice of where to send their capital and labor, more
often than not send it to America. And the U.S. economy repays their trust:
invested money yields good returns; settled migrants do likewise and often become
American citizens to boot. The exception to this rule was the age of autarky
that arose in the 1910s and 1920s in the name of fighting off terror.

For the U.S. it began when an anarchist murdered President William McKinley
in September 1901. The world had seen four similar assassinations in the previous
decade, along with a rash of random street bombings. The shadowy international
network of terrorists shared explosives recipes and the conviction that, in
the words of the bomber Emile Henry, "il n'y a pas d'innocents"
in the modern world.

Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor, declared war on anarchism, starting
with an investigation into the control of immigration. Thus began an effort,
popular among labor unions and other race-baiting constituencies, to turn the
war on terror into an opportunistic war on foreigners. Congressional commissions
and their expert witnesses derided the "quality" of immigrants, chided
them for an insufficient desire to Americanize and lashed out at intellectuals
who professed support for a cosmopolitan tolerance. A 1903 law prohibited the
immigration of anarchists and the commissions began looking into more restrictions.

The cosmopolitans had the figures on their side: the globalisation of capital
markets and decades of mass migration disproportionately favored the U.S. economy,
whose extraordinary productivity attracted overseas investment. But, fearful
of a world everywhere collapsing into violence, Congress continued to shut the
golden door, passing laws beginning in 1917 that - with increasing obviousness
- correlated the desirability of an immigrant with the lightness of his skin
color.

The Department of Justice decided it could detain and deport immigrant radicals
without the bother of indictment or trial. During the Democrat administration
of Woodrow Wilson, A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general, made a name by
rounding up "undesirable aliens" to ship overseas.

But the terror did not stop. Indeed, it ratcheted up in explicit reaction to
the government's behavior. A 1919 letter-bomb campaign targeted official supporters
of deportation; in July a man blew himself up trying to kill the attorney general.
Palmer struck back, detaining and deporting more foreigners, herding more than
800 onto ships and bidding them good riddance.

And the terror did not stop. Late in 1920 a bomb went off in Wall Street. "There
was no objective except general terrorism," a paper reported. Palmer identified
the explosion as part of a plot to undermine American capitalism and vowed to
expose it.

Yet two decades of eroding civil liberties, restricting immigration and increasing
federal police power had not reduced terror but instead increased Americans'
mistrust of their own institutions. This trend focused ultimately on the trial
of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchists, for two murders
during the robbery of a shoe factory. Sacco and Vanzetti were rough customers,
possibly involved with the 1919 bombings. But persuasive evidence never surfaced
for the murders they were charged with, though the government prosecuted and
electrocuted them anyway. This indiscriminate zeal increased public conviction
that, as attorney Clarence Darrow said, "prejudice and passion" were
guiding the government's actions.

The shutting-down of immigration and global trade in the 1920s reduced the
flexibility of the markets' natural responses to crises and a distrusted government
could offer no leadership. The movement of global resources that benefited America
stopped after 1929 and the nation sank into depression.

When globalization did return it aided the U.S. again. Immigration was liberalized
in 1965. Capital inflows ultimately exceeded outflows, making the U.S. the world's
biggest debtor in 1986. And trust in the security of U.S. investment kept money
and migrants pouring in, fuelling the long boom.

Now that trust has faltered and, rather than repair the breach, the U.S. government
is repeating past mistakes, setting aside the liberties that support faith in
American institutions in favor of a show of strength directed at foreigners.
Many have been detained. Apart from Richard Reid - who pleaded guilty - none
has been convicted. Mistrust of government is rising. This terror-fighting strategy
did not work before and it is not working now.

This article was first published in the Financial Times and is reprinted with permission.